Back in April, Microsoft announced the availability of Bing Knowledge Widget. The JavaScript-based widget for webmasters that detects and visualizes entities on the webpage and displays rich information about the entity. A visitor to your site need simply hover over the objects you’ve selected in the backend to see the widget come to life along the right-hand side of the screen, showcasing content related to each entity, directly from Bing’s knowledge repository. But then, webmasters have to add the embed code to thousands of pages to enhance their websites with the rich entity information from the Bing Knowledge system. Now, you can manage them from a single place in the cloud.

Today, we are taking the next step and are making it even easier for webmasters to put Bing Knowledge to work on their sites by integrating the functionality to do so into Bing Webmaster Tools. Now, you can easily manage multiple Bing Knowledge Widgets and settings from within the familiar Webmaster Tools experience. And when you customize your settings, instead of you having to update your pages with new embed code and republish every time you make a change, we provide you with just a single line of code and let you manage and store your settings in the cloud.

The Bing Knowledge Widget can be configured with three pre-defined options:

Entity Images: when you select this option entities that are detected will appear only as images in a vertical carousel alongside the page.

Entity Images & Links: when you select this option entities that are detected will appear both as images in a vertical carousel alongside the page as well as links within the text of the page. This is the most popular option.

Entity Links: when you select this option, entities that are detected will appear as links within the text of the page.

Today, they are adding the fourth option called Interactive only.

If you choose “Interactive only”, we will identify and visualize entities only when a user selects text on the page (e.g. by highlighting it) and clicking the Bing logo. Naturally, we will still take surrounding context into consideration to understand which entity is contained in the selected text and present most relevant results. If you select any of the other 3 visualization modes, the interactive option is automatically enabled.